Jesus Fu@%ing Christ, people. It's a stupid mistake. Are we too screwed up to realize that companies are composed of people and that people sometimes make mistakes? I don't know about you, but I see really big differences between this and the Kryptonite "pick a lock with a ball point pen" crisis. (Hint: It actually was a crisis.)

This is just stupid. If Fox News wrote sensationalized blog entries, it'd be about stuff like this this Target mistake.

The real "crisis" here is people not thinking. I don't honestly believe for one second that target it selling illegal drugs. Do you?

I suspect that if someone bothered to tell them about the problem instead of using this as an opportunity to blame their PR folks for not reading blogs, they probably would have fixed it and gone on with life. Making fun of them on your blog is all well and good, but calling this a crisis strikes me as being over the top.

Update: As others noted, I shouldn't have said Scoble was complaining too. Whoops.

Here's my answer: it's not that bloggers are dumb, it's generally worse. It's like that guy at the party who keeps talking...overly dramatic, insecure about not being heard, and self-righteous when they believe they do have the spotlight, via some "scoop" story like this one.

Just another example of how bloggers, in general, can be just like Chicken Little. Over time, I'm finding that the blogosphere is being filled with people who fit into some very neat categories.

And I'm not one to be a fan of generalizations, so I actually wish this wasn't the case, in my opinion.

1. there's the media/technologist/visionary Marc Canter blogger:

..overly dramatic (FOAF or DIE!!!)
..drops blogger celebrity names at least once a post
..about once a week, will explain how he/she had predicted years ago that some current event would happen (and includes the self-referential link to his blog post where he/she apparently did so)

2. there's the techy/programmer/sysadmin know-it-all blogger: (not including you here, Jeremy, for various reasons, but am including many of your audience)

..passes judgement on technology decisions made by other companies without having really any idea about the technology's implementation
..offers their all-powerful and so-simple genius solutions to technology problems, with the luxury of cursing the company for being dumb for not taking their expert opinion
..generally elitist character

3. there's the academic researcher blogger:

..critical of other bloggers, industries, companies, pretty much everything for not agreeing with them
..quite bitter about The Man and all things out to make money
..fond of making gross generalizations (like the ones I'm making here)

I'm sure that you can come up with much more, maybe there should be some sort of taxonomy. :) Basically, I find that major bloggers are just people who, possibly because they don't really have to deal with face-to-face rebuttals of their thoughts, can be quite knee-jerk reactive in their publishings.

The problem is some sort of dummy data inserted as a juvenile prank. It's a problem with how Target.com's backend system interacts with Amazon's data. (For those that don't know, Amazon runs Target.com)

Come on now Jeremy, you shouldn't expect too much of people. The idea of spreading publishing around to everyone means that, commonly, you'll have people complaining/commenting/explaining/being and authority on things they really have no idea about.

If that sounds like I'm judging, so be it, but it's really a small price to pay for people individually having a way of getting their thoughts out there.

It does make it a little harder on some organizations. I, like you, don't care much about Target's data problems. They're kind of funny, but I'm not going to short the stock or call for the head of PR.

Jeremy, I understand where you're coming from - this is hardly Target's Three Mile Island. And I am not faulting them for not jumping into the fray on Thanksgiving weekend. But now that I see that Boing Boing blogged this web site glitch over a week ago, there's really no excuse for at a bare minimum getting this issue remedied. Sorry.

It's not a crisis, the sky isn't falling. But it does point out that companies - especially those with a consumer (as opposed to b2b) focus - ignore blogistan at their peril.

It's not like it's going to impact their bottom line one way or another but on the other hand they've been the object of several hundred thousand snickers over the past week or so and they probably aren't even aware.

Jeremy, Nathan from InsideGoogle. If possible, could you please change the link to my post about the Target/marijuana story to http://insidegoogle.blogspot.com/2004/11/target-pushes-drugs.html? It's the exact same post, but under a different URL. I discovered the embarrassing misspelling in the title a little too late, and now I have a large number of websites linking to a post with a stupid mistake. Problem is, renaming the post changes the URL, and results in a broken link. So now, I have to go through an annoying trek around the internet, pointing everyone at the new URL before I can take down the old one. I'd very much appreciate it.

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